Pastor Jim arrested for giving out food & sharing Jesus?

I just received an e-mail from a person who was upset when the police showed up a few months ago to arrest me for handing out food & sharing Jesus with 130+ needy people on the street of a local Long Island village. She was upset that I was not arrested (I have a lot of fans).

You see, after losing our facility in Patchogue after 17 years hundreds of people had no way of receiving food from the Lighthouse Mission as they desperately counted on. So I asked my heavenly Father for direction. Then I started a new street outreach to assist the people left behind. After months of successfully operating the outreach & feeding hundreds of people someone contacted the local Mayors office to complain that we did not have "Official Permission" to hand out food within the village limits. Soon after I received an "Official Telephone Call" suggesting that if I showed up at the outreach location the following week to hand out food that the police would arrest me on site. "Why would you arrest me for helping the poor I asked" they simply repeated "if you come back you WILL be arrested.” How cool is that I thought? so of course I showed up next week with my box truck filled with food to a parking lot filled with 100+ people waiting for us to arrive as usual. We set up the food, people got in line & I shared the Gospel of Jesus with them. As I was preaching 2 police Constables arrived and waited in their cars and motioned in my direction. I waved and motioned back to them that I would be done in a moment. They waited near their cars. When I finished sharing Gods word I explained to the people that I was now going to be arrested. For some reason this seemed to anger the 100+ people calmly waiting for their food J (sometimes I can be a wise guy if you haven’t noticed). I had to (firmly but lovingly) remind them that Jesus would NOT flip over the police cars that came to arrest the Pastor who was feeding them (thank you Jesus they listened). However, they did escort me over to the police cars. By the way, you really know who your friends are when they show up to get arrested with you in the name of Jesus. The officers nervously asked me if I was Pastor Jim? I smiled and shook my head and held out my hands to receive the cuffs (I thought this would make a great photo for my resume J) and they said that they were not going to arrest me (bummer). They came to make sure the crowd was orderly and we were not making a mess of the parking lot. Soon after they left. A week later we received “Official Permission” in the mail to use the parking lot for 1 hour per week to feed to local residents in need. The parking lot has never been so clean. Thank you Jesus

I can’t wait to see what God is going to do next!!

- God be with you, Pastor Jim